Sinister Barrier Read Free Page B

schizophrenics especially. There’s wisdom in his madhouse, but it needs digging out.”
    The reader looked up. “There are two paragraphs, and that’s the first.”
    “Go on! Go on, man!” urged Graham, impatiently. The officer continued while Graham kept eagle eyes upon the visor, and Wohl looked more and more mystified.
    “There is a real connection between the most unexpected and ill-assorted things. Oddities have links too surreptitious to have been perceived. Fireballs and howling dogs and second-sighters who are not so simple as we think. Inspiration and emotion and everlasting cussedness. Bells that chime unswung by human hands; ships that vanish in sunlit calm; lemmings that migrate to (the valley of the shadow. Arguments, ferocity, ritualistic rigmarole, and pyramids with unseen peaks. It would seem a nightmarish hodge-podge of surrealists at their worst—if I didn’t know Bjornsen was right, terribly right! It is a picture that must be shown the world—if it can be shown without massacre!”
    “What did I tell you?” asked Wohl. He tapped his forehead significantly. “A narcotic nut!”
    “We’ll see about that.” Bringing his face closer to the telephone’s scanner, Graham said to the distant officer, “File that sheet where it’ll be safe. Make two more typewritten copies and have them sent to Sangster, care of the U.S. department of special finance at their local office in Bank of Manhattan.”
    He switched off the amplifier, pronged the receiver. The tiny television screen went blank.
    “If you don’t mind, I’d like to go with you to the station,” he told Wohl.
    They went out together; Wohl convinced that here was work for the local narcotic squad; Graham pondering the possibility of the two deaths being natural despite their element of mystery. As they crossed the sidewalk both felt a strange, nervous thrill. Something peered into their minds, grinned and slunk away.

Chapter 2
     
     
    NO NEW INFORMATION AWAITED THEM at the station. Fingerprint men had returned from Mayo’s laboratory as well as from Webb’s office, had developed and printed their photographs. There were a mass of prints, some clear, some blurred. Most had been brought out with aluminum powder; a few—on fibrous surfaces—with iodine vapor. The great majority were prints left by the scientists themselves. The others were not recorded on police files.
    Experts had gone with complete thoroughness through the dead men’s rooms and discovered not the slightest thing to arouse their own suspicions or confirm Graham’s. They reported with the faint air of men compelled to waste their time and talents on other people’s fads.
    “There’s nothing left but the autopsy,” declared Wohl, finally. “If Webb’s a drug addict, the case is cleared up. He died while shooting at some crazy product of his own imagination.”
    “And Mayo jumped into an imaginary bathtub?” queried Graham.
    “Huh?” Wohl looked startled.
    “I suggest an autopsy on both—if it’s possible to hold one on what’s left of Mayo.” Graham reached for his hat. His dark gray eyes were steady as they looked into Wohl’s blue ones. “Phone Sangster and let him know the results.” He hurried out with characteristic energy.
    A pile of wreckage cluttered the corner of Pine and Nassau. Graham got a glimpse over the heads of the surging crowd, saw two crumpled gyrocars which appeared to have met in head-on collision. The crowd thickened rapidly, pushed, stood on tiptoe, murmured with excitement. He could sense their psychopathic tension as he passed. It was like moving through an invisible aura of vibrancy. The mob-noumen.
    “Disaster is to crowds what sugar is to flies,” he commented to himself.
    Entering the huge pile of Bank of Manhattan Building, he took a pneumatic levitator to the twenty-fourth floor. Pushing through a gold-lettered door, he said, “Hello, Hetty!” to the honey-blonde at the switchboard, and passed on to a door marked